Re-Awakening: I Ascend with a Legendary class

Chapter 837: The Second Light

The light poured down the Door like water.

Everyone inside the new ring of frosted stones stood still and watched it. Eleven thousand people from Frosthold had come through that same Door a little over two weeks ago. They remembered the light. They remembered what had come after it.

Corvin stood at the foot of the Door, beside Ainen’s fire and the ice-blue shoot, with his feet planted and his frozen arm in its sling. Big D stood beside him.

"Who do you think it is?" Corvin asked.

"Doesn’t matter," Big D said. "They’ll be cold and scared and they won’t know anything. Same as all of us."

The light reached the ground.

People began to walk out of it.

They came out slowly, a few at a time at first, and then in a great crowd. They wore red and black and dark bronze. They carried no weapons that glowed, and no cards, and they looked around at the frosted grass and the pale rings in the night sky with wide, lost eyes.

The first of them stopped dead a few paces out from the Door.

He was a tall man, broad in the shoulder, with gray coming into his beard. He was staring at Corvin.

"Frosthold?" he said. "What in the world is Frosthold doing here?"

"Keeping the door," Corvin said. "Wipe your feet."

The tall man opened his mouth. Then he closed it again. He looked past Corvin, at the ring of white stones, the cook fires, and the eleven thousand people standing quietly in the frost. He looked up at the rings in the sky.

"Where are we?" he asked. His voice had dropped.

"Layer Four," Big D said. "The Layer of Rebirth. You’ll want to sit down. There’s a lot to tell you, and none of it is good, and some of it is very good. Who are you?"

The tall man drew himself up.

"I am the Warlord of Emberfall," he said.

Behind him, more and more people were pouring out of the light. There were thousands of them now, all in red and bronze, crowding together and staring.

"Emberfall," Big D said. He turned his head. "Rudra."

Rudra had been standing at the back with Natalia and Kael. He came forward slowly.

The Warlord saw him, and his face changed.

"You," he said.

"Me," Rudra agreed.

"The champion." The Warlord looked him up and down. "The one who walked into my ring and beat the Pyreking in front of half my empire. Thirty-seven years ago. My people still talk about it."

Somewhere in the crowd behind him, a voice called out.

"Champion!"

Then another. Then a dozen more. People in red and bronze were pushing forward through the crowd to see. They were pointing at Rudra, and some of them were shouting his name.

Rudra stood very still. His face had gone red.

"I didn’t know they’d remember," he said quietly to Natalia.

"You won a whole empire’s tournament," Natalia said. "Of course they remember."

A man pushed his way to the front of the crowd. He was lean and gray, and he moved with a precise kind of grace. When he saw Rudra, he stopped. Then he smiled, slowly.

"Regalon," he said.

"Pyreking," said Rudra.

The two of them looked at each other for a long moment. Thirty-seven years had passed since the ring. Both of them had gone gray.

"I’ve been waiting a long time for a rematch," the Pyreking said.

"Not here," Rudra said. "Trust me. Not here. Neither of us has anything left to fight with."

The Pyreking frowned. He looked down at his own hands. Then he held one out and closed his fist, the way a man calls a card.

Nothing happened.

"Sit down," Big D said again, more gently this time. "All of you. We’ll explain."

It took most of the night.

Big D did most of the talking. He told it plainly, the way he told everything. The Hub was gone. The decks and the Tiers were gone. There were Life Imprints now, and Soul Weight, and Power Orbs, and Enders that ended things. There were lines that nothing could cross.

Corvin interrupted every few minutes to add something rude. Hessa told them about sanctuaries. Natalia showed them how an orb worked. Kael demonstrated Quickstep, then sat down heavily and asked for water.

The Warlord listened to all of it in silence. He did not interrupt once.

When Big D finished, the Warlord was quiet for a long time.

"How many have you lost?" he asked at last.

Big D told him. Four on the first night. Nine to the Smother. Forty-one from Frosthold to the Forgetter. And all of the others in between.

"And how many would we have lost," the Warlord asked, "if there had been nobody here when we came through?"

Corvin answered that one.

"Most of you," he said. "Probably."

The Warlord looked at the old king for a long moment. Then at the ring of frosted stones around them. Then at the ice-blue shoot beside the fire.

He bowed his head.

"Emberfall owes Frosthold a debt," he said. "I don’t say that lightly. I have never said it to Frosthold before."

"I know," Corvin said. "I’m enjoying it."

Rudra asked the question at dawn.

"Warlord. Check your pockets."

The Warlord frowned at him. "What?"

"Every kingdom carried its home through the Door. The layer turns it into a seed. Corvin had his for a week before he knew what it was. Check your pockets."

The Warlord looked at him as if he were mad.

Then he put his hand inside his heavy bronze coat. He felt around for a moment, and his face changed. Slowly, he drew out a seed.

It was dark red, like a coal that had almost gone out. It was warm, and it glowed faintly from somewhere deep inside. When he turned it in the light, tiny sparks moved under its skin.

"Emberfall," Rudra said quietly.

The Warlord stared at it. He did not speak.

"Where do I plant it?" he said at last. "Here?"

"Not here," Big D said. "There’s already a line here. Two lines on one spot doesn’t help anyone."

He knelt in the frost and drew in the dirt with his finger.

"The Door’s here," he said, and made a mark. "Brightwater, where we live, is five days north." Another mark. "Greywatch is on the way, a day out from here. And between Greywatch and Brightwater, there are four days of open grass with nothing in them but Enders."

He drew a line from the Door to Brightwater, and tapped a spot halfway between Greywatch and Brightwater.

"There," he said. "Plant your home there. Then anyone walking from this Door to Brightwater never has to spend more than two nights outside a line."

The Warlord looked at the line in the dirt for a long time.

"A road," he said slowly. "You’re building a road."

"A road with lights on it," Big D said. "Somebody’s home, every couple of days, all the way north. So that the next kingdom that comes through doesn’t have to do what we did."

They left two days later.

Emberfall needed a day just to understand where they were. Many of them wept. Some of them sat by the fires and stared at nothing for hours. But by the second morning, most of them were on their feet.

Corvin stayed at the Door with Frosthold.

"Somebody has to keep the light on," he said, when Big D came to say goodbye. "And somebody has to sit here and be rude to the next lot."

"You’ll be good at it," Big D said.

"I’m already good at it." Corvin held up his frozen hand. Three fingers moved now. "Look."

"I see."

"Three."

"I see, Corvin."

John stayed too. Nobody quite knew why. He said that someone ought to keep Corvin company, and Corvin said that was the last thing he wanted. Then John sat down beside him at the fire anyway, and Corvin did not tell him to leave.

The march north with Emberfall took three days.

Thirteen thousand people walked with Big D, Rudra, Natalia, Kael, Hessa and the two hundred Regalon hunters. They stopped one night at Greywatch, where Orla met them at the line and stared at the crowd.

"How many kingdoms are there?" she asked weakly.

"Ten," Rudra said. "Six still to come."

Orla sat down on a white stone and put her head in her hands.

On the second day, between Greywatch and the spot Big D had chosen, the Enders came.

There were not many. A Wearer at the edge of a pond, and a pack of scavengers that had followed them all morning. But Emberfall had never seen an Ender before, and half of them broke the moment the tiredness hit.

The Pyreking did not break.

He stood his ground at the front of the line while the Wearer’s pull washed over him. His legs shook. Sweat ran down his face. He opened his status with trembling hands, read it, and laughed out loud.

"Kindle," he said. "My first imprint is Kindle."

He held his hand out toward the Wearer. A thin, flickering flame came out of his palm. It was barely the size of a candle. It was raw, and it cost him a great deal. But he held it there, and he did not let it go out.

It was enough. The flame cut through the tiredness like a lamp in fog. The Emberfall soldiers nearest him straightened, one by one.

Rudra walked out to the Wearer through the opening the Pyreking had made. He killed it the way Big D had taught him, slow and steady, with both hands.

Then he came back and handed the Pyreking its heart.

"Your first orb," Rudra said. "If it fits."

The Pyreking held it in both shaking hands.

Kindle.

It folded. It left an orb the color of a red coal.

[Power Orb: Hearthflame]

[Quality: E]

[A small fire that no tiredness can put out. Those near it stay on their feet.]

The Pyreking stared at it. Then he looked up at Rudra, and his eyes were wet.

"That’s twice now," he said. "That you’ve beaten me to something."

"I didn’t beat you to anything," Rudra said. "I just handed it over."

"That’s what I mean."

They reached the halfway point on the third evening.

It was a low rise in the middle of the grass, with a stream running past one side and a stand of old trees on the other. Big D walked to the top of it and looked around for a long time. Then he nodded.

"Here," he said.

The Warlord came up beside him with the dark red seed in his hand.

Thirteen thousand people gathered around the base of the rise and watched. Nobody spoke.

The Warlord knelt. He was not a man who knelt easily. He dug into the earth with his bare hands until he had made a hole.

"Emberfall," he said to the seed. "You burned for longer than anyone can remember. You never once went out." His voice was low and rough. "Burn here. Be warm. Be the kind of fire people walk toward in the dark."

He put the seed in the ground and covered it.

The earth grew warm.

It spread out from the Warlord’s hands in a wide circle. The grass did not burn. It glowed faintly, a soft red, like coals under ash. At the edge of the circle, the ground split open, and white stones rose up one after another. Every one of them was warm to the touch, with a faint red light flickering inside the stone.

When the ring closed, a single shoot stood at the top of the rise. It was dark red, with leaves like small flames.

The Warlord knelt beside it and did not get up for a long time.

Big D stood on the rise and looked south.

He could not see the Door from there. It was too far. But he knew it was there. Frosthold was there, with its frosted ring and Ainen’s fire. Greywatch was a day to the north of that. Then came four days of grass, broken now in the middle by a new ring with red light inside its stones. Then Brightwater, with its river and its towers, and the little shoot in the square.

Three lights. Soon four, when Skytheum planted.

"A road with lights on it," Rudra said, coming up beside him.

"It’s a start," Big D said.

Hessa had not come up the rise. She was standing at the bottom, by the new line. She had one hand pressed over her eyes, and she had not moved for several minutes.

Big D saw her and went down.

"What is it?" he asked.

Hessa lowered her hand slowly. Her face was gray.

"I asked my orb to watch the north," she said. "I’ve had a bad feeling about the north ever since Brightwater. I didn’t tell anyone. I just asked it to keep an eye on things."

"And?"

"And every Ender lord within twenty days’ walk just got up," Hessa said quietly. "All of them. At the same time. Like something called them."

Big D was silent.

"Which way are they going?" he asked.

Hessa looked at him.

"Toward the lines," she said. "All of them. Toward every line we’ve planted."